12 January 2016

How Much Is Software Failure Really Costing Your Company?

An IDC report in 2015 estimated that "a typical Fortune 1000" company loses between US$500,000 to US$1 million for each hour of critical application failure. Can your company and your reputation afford such stinging losses?

One reason for such high losses is a lack of a thorough and practical disaster recovery plan. Another significant reason we have deduced after speaking to hundreds of testing leaders and professionals, is the paucity of attention and care given to ensuring software testing programs are appropriately designed and implemented.

Too often, companies test software based on what their people think is right, rather than what is actually a mission-critical process or system. This subjective process results in inadequate testing procedures that often default to the convenience of the tester, rather than keeping the robustness and reliability of the system at the forefront.

We have implemented our proprietary risk-based test planning algorithms across our clients' testing programs to great affect. The objectivity of incorporating the business and technology views of all processes to arrive at a single, quantifiable risk score has two advantages:

It helps to keep the testing team focused on testing the most at-risk systems and processes more thoroughly.